SB 1047, UBI study, livity, ngakpas, Megalopolis
Steve Newman on the SB 1047 debate.
Dan Hendrycks (of the Center for AI Safety) in Time: California’s draft AI law would protect more than just people
Helen Toner on starting points for cooperating on AI regulation: evals, third-party auditing, incident tracking, and a clearer sense of who's liable for AI harms
US, Britain, and the EU to sign agreement on AI standards.
A list of things that an AGI developer has to do for things to go well with superhuman AI, compiled by Sam Bowman, who leads a safety research group at Anthropic.
Fresh from DeepMind: New AI system designs proteins that successfully bind to target molecules
Top Tier Impact is hosting a panel on investing in safe AI this Monday. David Langer, founding partner of Lionheart (where I work), will be speaking alongside other leaders in the space. Investors can register to join here.
Talks underway for a deal that would value OpenAI at over $100B.
Tim Ferriss: An email from Coach Sommer I revisit often. Nominally about strength training, but actually about life: "impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals... The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home."
Don't underestimate the Feds: "The ANOM sting operation... is a collaboration by law enforcement agencies from several countries, running between 2018 and 2021, that intercepted millions of messages sent through the supposedly secure smartphone-based proprietary messaging app ANOM. The ANOM service was widely used by criminals, but instead of providing secure communication, it was actually a trojan horse covertly distributed by the FBI... enabling them to monitor all communications."
Critical infrastructure sustained more than 420 million cyber attacks in 2023; that's 13 attacks per second.
China leads in up to 89% of tech research. I have questions about the methodology...
Zvi on Sam Altman's UBI study.
"Iran’s president said Saturday his country needs some $100 billion in foreign investment to achieve an annual target of 8% economic growth up from the current rate of 4%." Iranian inflation is currently over 40% annually(!)
Systematic review of psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide, MDMA, ayahuasca, and escitalopram for depression in The BMJ. Finds that psilocybin outperforms escitalopram (an SSRI) whereas the other psychedelics don't, but there's enough heterogeneity in the literature right now (study design, participant populations, therapeutic pairings) such that I don't find summary results like this very informative.
Amy Emerson steps down from Lykos. Psychedelic Alpha interview with Lykos' incoming CMO, who previously led Spravato at Johnson & Johnson.
The 10 Principles of Burning Man. Radical Self-reliance is very resonant for me; Immediacy has been a sleeper hit.
#lifegoals: "ngakpas hold a respected and important role as spiritual practitioners and often serve as intermediaries between the monastic community and the lay population."
Profile on Marianne Williamson from 1992.
Sid Sridhar of Wave on how to decide whether to work at an early-stage startup.
Scott Alexander goes to bat for Próspera on Twitter.
"Livity is the Rastafari concept of righteous, everliving living. Its essence is the realization that an energy, or life force, conferred by Jah (God), exists within, and flows through, all people and all living things... A primary goal in a Rasta's life is to expand their livity. In Rastafari philosophy, livity can be enhanced by intense prayer and meditation (often enhanced by sacramental cannabis use), adherence to an Ital diet, and perhaps most importantly, loving behavior toward others."
"“Relationship broken, add more people” is one the most famous blunders in Poly, it’s our version of “Start a land war in Asia during winter.”"
AI safety in plain English (Twitter).
Here's that Megalopolis trailer. Looks fire, apart from the fake quotes at the beginning. "We’re in need of a great debate about the future!"